Liberalism Is Having a Bad Week

And it’s only Wednesday. Last night I noted that NBC Nightly News had turned on Obamacare. Today there are more media defections and embarrassments rolling out.

First, this morning brings a brutal New York Times expose of the Clinton Foundation. (The Times website was down for a long time this morning; rumor was a cyberattack. I blame Bill Clinton.) Anyway, the story is not flattering—I saw at least one Facebook comment wondering whether Rush Limbaugh had somehow taken over the Times:

For all of its successes, the Clinton Foundation had become a sprawling concern, supervised by a rotating board of old Clinton hands, vulnerable to distraction and threatened by conflicts of interest. It ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in. . .

And efforts to insulate the foundation from potential conflicts have highlighted just how difficult it can be to disentangle the Clintons’ charity work from Mr. Clinton’s moneymaking ventures and Mrs. Clinton’s political future, according to interviews with more than two dozen former and current foundation employees, donors and advisers to the family. Nearly all of them declined to speak for attribution, citing their unwillingness to alienate the Clinton family.

Yeah, I’ll bet. But I’m sure the Clintons can still count on the support of Anthony Weiner. My favorite detail in the story: Bill Clinton no longer eats meat or dairy products.

Second, Obama’s political action arm, Organizing for Action, held a climate change rally yesterday in Georgetown. No one showed up. Heh.

Third, the Obama administration received a huge smackdown from the DC Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday, which ruled that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was in violation of the law by not ruling on the permit application for the nuclear waste depository at Yucca Mountain (pronounced “Yooo-cah” Mountain if you’re John Kerry; otherwise it’s “Yuck-a” to Nevadans). More significant than the ruling was the language of the opinion, which ought to apply to several other recent moves of the Obama Administration, such as postponing clear statutory deadlines in Obamacare. From the Wall Street Journal story:

The appeals court, citing a 1982 law directing the NRC to complete reviews within three years of an application, said “the president and federal agencies may not ignore statutory mandates or prohibitions merely because of policy disagreements.”